Share this book

Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

“[Terrence Holt] is Melville + Poe + Borges but with a heart far more capacious.”—Junot Díaz

Holt, whose In the Valley of the Kings was hailed as a “work of genius” (New York Times) and made Amazon’s Top Ten Short Story Collections of the year, brings a writer’s eye to his experiences as a first-year graduate doctor.

Intense, ironic, heartfelt, and heartbreaking, these nine vivid episodes take us to the bedside of a patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, through a nightmarish struggle to convince a man that he has cancer, to a life-and-death effort to keep an oxygen mask on a claustrophobic patient, and into the lounge of a snowbound hospital where doctors swap yarns through the night.

Personal, poignant, and meticulously precise, these stories evoke Chekhov, Maugham, and William Carlos Williams. Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.

About the author

Terrence Holt is a writer and an internist specializing in geriatric medicine, teaching and practicing at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Specifications

Specifications

Release date: 31 Aug 2014

RRP: $27.99

Paperback ISBN: 9781863956901

eISBN: 9781922231819

Imprint: Black Inc.

Format: PB

Size: 210 x 135mm

Extent: 288pp

Praise for Internal Medicine

‘In Internal Medicine Terrence Holt has written a guided tour of a very particular hell, the "Inferno" of medical training. This is a trenchant and devastating book, but, miraculously, not a dispiriting one. Holt's beleaguered Resident makes us gaze with him into abysses of every sort of physical, emotional, and spiritual pain, and yet what we feel with him, at the end of every story, is a resilient, exalting love of the world and the people doomed to suffer in it.’ —Chris Adrian, author of The Children’s Hospital

‘Each exquisitely crafted and evocative tale reveals not only the power of Holt’s storytelling, but the stark realization that for doctors and patients alike, it’s our bodies that “remain the essential mystery we keep trying to solve.’ —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

‘Terrence Holt writes with unflinching honesty about all the fears, joys and brutalities of a junior doctor's work.’ —Karen Hitchcock

‘Holt dissects the medical experience in exquisite and restrained prose.’ —New York Times

‘The account is both heartfelt and heartbreaking and shows what it means to be a doctor, mortal and human.’ —Australian Ageing Agenda

‘In its undaunted vision of our plight and promise as a fallen race, its intricate rhythms of tenderness and pain, the torque of its knowing, Internal Medicine is an uncommon, lovely work of art. I feel myself expanded and enlarged by it. Holt's integrity and intelligence are gifts that alter how we view the wreckage and wonder of our lives.’ —William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark

‘Where do the brutal limitations of our mortal selves meet the grace of kindness? Where do simple observations of the progress of lives become a spare human poetry? Perhaps nowhere more so than in the practice of medicine, and in the finest of writing. These are the remarkable occurrences that fill and enrich Terrence Holt’s elegant and heart-rending memoir.’ —Vincent Lam, author of The Headmaster’s Wager